A very large percentage of the international population is affected with some sort of psychotic disorder that if left undiagnosed and untreated could result in injury to the person with the disorder and/or to people associated and/or close to the person with the disorder. Diagnosis of a psychological disorder can often take time to properly diagnose with only a handful of approved drugs available to treat such disorders once diagnosed. Almost every physician would agree that additional drugs are needed in order to properly treat the vast array of psychological disorders in the international population today and in the future. However, conventional methods of determining the anti-psychotic properties of a candidate agent are often time consuming and costly. Many times candidate agents are merely slight chemical manipulations of existing anti-psychotic agents in order to make them either more effective or last longer. Very few “new” candidates that are totally different from existing drugs ever make it to the discovery stage since most of the money and focus is tied up in the aforementioned chemical manipulation of a know anti-psychotic agents. In fact, in 2005 a NIH-funded study found that treatment with contemporary antipsychotics was no more effective that with the drugs that were introduced up to 40 years ago.
Once a researcher makes or designs a new compound or manipulates an old compound in such a way that it might have anti-psychotic properties, the compound must go through a basic level of screening to determine whether the new compound actually has anti-psychotic properties. This is often a behavioral based study and can take extensive periods of time to observe the behavior of animals, such as rats, before and after being administered the new compound, to make the determination whether the experimental compound actually processes anti-psychotic properties. This is time consuming and expensive.
Moreover, in order to check whether a compound actually has anti-psychotic capabilities an animal model having psychotic tendencies must be maintained so that it can be determined whether behavioral attributes associated with psychotic disorders of the model disappear or are attenuated once the experimental compound is administered. Therefore, what is needed is a fast, inexpensive way for research scientists to assay many chemical compounds and segregate the most promising candidates more quickly and less expensively so that more candidate agents are available for the next stage of development. In particular, what is needed is a high throughput assay, which will allow many compounds to be assayed over a short period of time, less expensively than traditional “inject and observe” behavioral methods. The present invention provides such an assay that overcomes the shortcomings of the prior methods.